First impressions

[Gregory S. Baber]

Hello, the Baltimore Usenix was my first. I stayed Monday through Wednesday.
I attended tutorials on Monday and Tuesday, which were, for the most part,
professionally run. I was, however, somewhat disappointed with the quality
of the paper presentations given on Wednesday.
Maybe I caught a bad day, and I realize that the speakers had a very short
time to present, but I though that most of the speakers were fair at best.
The overhead slides were generally unreadable (I sat about halfway back)
and only a couple of the speakers had identifiable conclusion sections where
they summarized the results of the work they had been doing. I've had to
give a number of technical presentations at work, as well as conduct many
week-long training classes, so I have a fairly good idea of how to put
a technical presentation together.
Again, I didn't stay for the full week, and this was my first conference,
but is this fairly typical of the paper presentations? If so, I might be
tempted to skip the presentations altogether and just read the proceedings.


Sorry to be picky, but I expected better.     Thanks, gregb

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